Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication systems, and more particularly, to improving processing of transport protocol communications.
Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various telecommunication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, and broadcasts. Typical wireless communication systems may employ multiple-access technologies capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing available system resources. Examples of such multiple-access technologies include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems, and time division synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA) systems.
These multiple access technologies have been adopted in various telecommunication standards to provide a common protocol that enables different wireless devices to communicate on a municipal, national, regional, and even global level. An example telecommunication standard is Long Term Evolution (LTE). LTE is a set of enhancements to the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) mobile standard promulgated by Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). LTE is designed to support mobile broadband access through improved spectral efficiency, lowered costs, and improved services using OFDMA on the downlink, SC-FDMA on the uplink, and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology. However, as the demand for mobile broadband access continues to increase, there exists a need for further improvements in LTE technology. These improvements may also be applicable to other multi-access technologies and the telecommunication standards that employ these technologies.
In computer networking, a transport protocol or transport layer provides end-to-end or host-to-host communication services for applications within a layered architecture of network components and protocols. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is an implementation of transport protocol that provides the functional and procedural means of transferring data sequences from a source to a destination host via one or more networks, while maintaining the quality of service. TCP is usually built on top of the Internet Protocol (IP). TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a data stream between applications running on hosts communicating over an IP network. TCP provides the acknowledgement (ACK) of the successful data transmission and sends the next data when it knows that a sufficient portion of previously sent data has been received. In addition to providing reliable end-to-end transfer through an acknowledgment mechanism, error control and retransmission, TCP also implements flow control algorithm. The transmission medium of TCP may be wire lines and/or wireless links. The wireless link for TCP may use Long-Term Evolution (LTE) standard. Applications that do not require reliable data stream service may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which provides a connectionless datagram service that emphasizes reduced latency over reliability.
The central processing unit (CPU) or hardware cost in terms of processing overhead for TCP traffic relative to UDP traffic increases at higher data rates because the TCP traffic generates multiple TCP acknowledgments (e.g., small IP Frames) in the reverse direction of data communication. The cost of processing these TCP acknowledgments becomes a dominant cost at higher data transfer rates since the processing cost scales with the number of IP frames processed in the higher-layers of the protocol stack and this cost scales with the data transfer rates on the reverse direction of data communication. As the rate of data transfer for chipsets becomes faster and faster, provisioning the CPU and/or memory to accommodate the cost of processing the ever increasing number of TCP acknowledgments would make the chipsets expensive.